Maternal antecedents to adolescent girls’ neural regulation of emotion

Current research on adolescent brain development has uncovered individual differences in patterns of functional connectivity during the regulation of emotions, reflecting differences in psychological and emotional functioning. The purpose of this study was to identify possible contributors to these individual differences by investigating the role of maternal emotional resources, in the form of adult attachment and emotional awareness. Participants included 35 adolescent girls (M age = 15.51, SD = 0.37) who completed an implicit emotion regulation task (Lieberman et al., 2007) during an fMRI scan following 9th grade. Mothers reported on the quality of their adult attachment when youth were in 3rd and 4th grades and reported on their emotional awareness when youth were in 4th and 5th grades. We found that higher levels of maternal anxious attachment and lower levels of maternal emotional awareness were significantly correlated with more positive (i.e., ineffective) amygdala-right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (rVLPFC) connectivity. Further, path analysis revealed that there was an indirect effect of maternal anxious attachment on adolescent functional connectivity through maternal emotional awareness. These results suggest that exposure to compromised maternal emotional resources in childhood may be linked to the development of ineffective neural processing of emotions, highlighting one pathway for the intergenerational transmission of disrupted emotion processing.U of I OnlyAuthor requested U of Illinois access only (OA after 2yrs) in Vireo ETD syste